


Scars Beneath the Skin

by Sholio



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, IN SPACE!, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-10-19 18:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20661443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: A pleasure cruise on Nebula's new ship turns deadly when one of Tony's old problems comes back to try to kill him.





	Scars Beneath the Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheron](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron/gifts).

> Many thanks to Edonohana for the genius plot idea!
> 
> Warning for blood and gore (though not especially graphic) and descriptions of surgery without anesthesia.

"I gotta hand it to you, Berry Blue, you've really moved up in the world since I met you."

The voice echoed from deep in the engine housing of Nebula's ship, along with various bangs and clunks. Nebula fidgeted, picked up a tool, put it down, and peered inside, but she could only see part of his foot. It was _her_ ship, and quite a nice ship, he wasn't wrong -- and _what was he even doing in there?_ The noises were very ominous.

"Do you know how to make my engines go faster, or not?" she demanded.

"Patience, Smurferella. Get it? It's like Cinderella except -- never mind, never mind, tough crowd." There was more anxiety-inducing banging around and a low whistle. "Do you even _realize_ how incredible this is? Earth is _centuries_ away from this kind of tech. I don't know what half of these things even _are."_

"If you break my ship, Stark, I will rip out your windpipe and stuff it up your --"

"Wow. _Really_ tough crowd. Chill. Your ship is in good hands. The best of hands." There was a loud clang that belied his words, followed by a not very confidence-inspiring, "Oops. Meant to do that. Everything's fine. Really."

The sad thing was, she believed his reassurances. And Nebula hadn't believed anybody about anything for a very long time.

He'd been all over her ship like a mirkmonkey ever since coming on board: poking his head into ducts, banging on things, asking things like "What's that? Where does that go? What's the thing that looks like a pineapple do?" For every answer she gave, he had a dozen more questions, until she jumped into a deserted sector and let him tinker with the engines to satisfy himself.

She knew vastly more about the specifics of starship engines and jump drives than he did, but what he had was a certain intuitive ability to make it all _work,_ not unlike that stupid raccoon, come to think of it. She could fix a burned-out Rask coil, replace an antimatter filter, even tweak the oxygen-hydrogen ratios for better efficiency and that kind of thing. Between her training and her long practice at making her own augmented body function properly, she was a deft hand at fixing engines and keeping them running.

But, as she'd learned on the flight from Titan to Terra, Tony could take a starship engine and make it stand up and do tricks. It was both useful and annoying, particularly since most _children_ knew more than Tony did about basic starship engineering. He didn't even know what a Rask coil _was,_ and yet he could look at one and say things like "Oh, you'd get more efficient waste-to-fuel conversion if you loop this so that it goes through the converter twice" and damn it all to freck, he was _right._

And, well, it was a very nice ship if she did say so herself, a small fast yacht that had formerly belonged to a Tyvokian mobster. She'd acquired it as part of a bounty job, ran a couple of smuggling jobs with it, and then landed it Tony's front yard and asked if he wanted a ride.

She refused to examine her own motives too closely. It was an excellent ship, and wasn't it gratifying to have her nice ship praised by someone who appreciated a good ship? Anyway, she needed to prove to Tony Stark that she wasn't always flying around in a salvaged piece of junk.

And he said he could make her engines more efficient, so it wasn't a gesture of trust to let him poke around in there, it was only sensible, right?

"I swear," Tony said, popping out of the engine compartment and making her jump back. "You're hovering around like an anxious father teaching his firstborn child to ride a bike -- speaking from experience here, by the way. What's this thing for?"

He held out a hand, palm up, with cables dangling down like limp spider legs from the fat globe of a Hringian power condelyzer.

"It takes the output from the Rask coils and condelyzes it before the final reversal at the antimatter catalyst chamber," she said. "Do not drop it unless you want to blow up the ship."

"That's a joke, right? Huh. Not a joke. Good to know." He ducked back inside.

"Do you plan to come out of there anytime soon?" Nebula asked, exasperated.

"Got somewhere to be?" his voice floated back.

"Lunch," Nebula said. "I have three different kinds of ration packs that won't poison humans, so you may make a selection."

"Very forward-thinking of you. Hang on, done in a tick."

What was a tick, some unit of backwards Terran timekeeping? This was really too much. The interior of the engine housing wasn't really big enough for two people, but Nebula squirmed inside anyway.

"Oh, hi," Tony said, as if having cyborg assassins wedge themselves into tight spaces with him happened every day. "You can show me how to hook this back up."

"You are going to kill us all." She leaned past him impatiently to reconnect the wires. It made her nervous having their engines offline like this. True, they were in completely uninhabited space and Thanos was dead, but _you never knew._

"People keep telling me that," Tony said lightly. "So, look. If I understand the way this works correctly --"

"You probably don't."

"Not impossible, but I think you can make the entire thing more efficient and therefore faster by eliminating some of the redundancy." Tony rolled onto his back. Nebula squirmed around in the tight space. "See, from what you've been telling me, you've got three different converters just to ..." He paused, and took a couple of deep breaths.

"Stark?"

"You know," he said, taking another deep breath, "I'm not claustrophobic, but just for the sake of argument ... you don't breathe, do you?"

"Yes, but I metabolize oxygen much more efficiently than a human. Why? Do I need to increase the ship's oxygen mix?"

"It's just a little tight in here," he said, and took a breath. "Right. Anyway. Redundancy. I think the reason why you're getting those drops in engine efficiency you've been noticing is because someone juiced up these engines for speed but didn't really know what they were doing. Like trying to supercharge a Mustang by sticking in a four-barrel carburetor but inexplicably leaving the old two-barrel hooked up to your brand-new hot-rod air intake manifold, so it has to go through _that_ to get to --"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Right. Engine very kludgy. Engine no go fast. Take out kludgy parts, make engine faster."

Nebula pushed herself up in the small space to take a look at his face, switching to low-light vision mode to get a better look. He really did sound like he was having trouble breathing, and he didn't look well, even for a human.

"So I assume there's a reason why you're staring at me from two inches away."

"I think it is time for lunch," Nebula said, and wormed out of the small space. When Tony didn't follow immediately, she hooked a hand onto his ankle.

"All right, all right, let go, I'm coming ..."

He seemed to have some trouble getting out. She ended up taking hold of first his leg, then his shirt, and yanking unceremoniously after her. She had to grip his elbow to stabilize him and keep him from falling straight onto his face.

"What is the matter with you?" she demanded. It was always a bit difficult to tell with humans, but the grayish tinge was not normal for his kind, and neither was the way his hair was plastered to his forehead. She'd seen Tony unwell on the flight back from Titan, and she'd also seen him healthy, so she had some basis for comparison -- and she was reasonably confident that he wasn't supposed to look like this if all his human organs were functioning normally. It occurred to her now that he had probably been feeling unwell for some time and simply hadn't said anything; it was unlikely he'd gotten _this_ bad in just a few minutes.

"I'm ... not sure," he managed, and wobbled away from her, catching himself on the wall. "Are there toxic fumes in there? Toxic to humans, I mean? It feels like ... no, can't be. _Can't_ be."

"Can't be what?" she asked, hovering uncertainly. She was good at troubleshooting her own malfunctions, but she didn't know any troubleshooting procedures for humans. She sent a mental query to the ship and received back a rundown of current conditions in the engine compartment. It didn't seem unhealthy for a human, but she wasn't familiar with the full range of human operating parameters. They were a strange species, vulnerable to the most trivial things and yet resilient against some of the harshest.

"My heart," Tony said, looking baffled. He slid slowly down the wall, one hand gripping his black shirt over his chest. "It feels like my heart, like it used to in the old days. What the _hell?"_

Nebula crouched in front of him. "Let me see."

"There's nothing _wrong,"_ he protested, but his harsh breathing was 197% too fast for human average based on her observations. When she continued to stare at him, saying nothing, he pulled up his shirt. Underneath there was the usual sort of internal skeleton with external skin covering that most of the galaxy's bipeds had. His chest showed significant scarring. Stupid primitive medicine, she thought.

"May I?" she asked, extending a hand.

"Sure, why not." Tony rolled his eyes ceilingward and tilted his head back against the wall. "You a doctor too? Ouch, that's cold." His voice was breathless, but it seemed nothing could shut him up.

"Of course I am not a doctor, and my hands are not cold."

"So you say, Smurfette."

She responded with an annoyed grunt and continued to probe, then scan. Her built-in scanners were poor for diagnosing issues with organic bodies, but there was one thing she could detect at first pass.

"Do you normally have metal in your chest?"

"Metal? What? No." He panted for a moment, then said, "I _used_ to. But it's not -- it can't be -- _no."_ He took a few deep breaths, then, casually: "Don't suppose you could show me where your sickbay is? Or whatever equivalent you have."

A cold sensation rippled through her: a malfunction in her internal heating matrix, perhaps. "There isn't one."

"What do you mean, there isn't one? Spaceships always have them on TV. Do you mean television has lied to me?"

His tone was light, but strained, and there was a note of distress underneath.

"I have no need for one." She was impatient, even a little angry; couldn't he see that just by looking at her? "I have the tools I need to repair myself, which are also useful for the engines."

Tony stared up at her for a moment. "Okay," he said, "_wow,_ we'll come back to _that_ later, but right now I need to see what's happening in my chest. You got anything that'll do that? Preferably," he added, "soon."

"I have a scanner," she said, scrambling to her feet. "Wait here."

As if he could do anything else, she berated herself as she hurried off. It was also dawning on her how few creature comforts she had on this ship. Blankets, for example. She just slept in the pilot's chair, or curled up next to a warm section of the engine casing as she used to do when she was younger. She had made sure there was human-edible food on board, because she _did_ eat, so it was something she'd thought about ahead of time -- it was necessary for survival. Comfort, however, was not. And it simply hadn't occurred to her that Tony was, perhaps, going to need to sleep somewhere. Or sit on something other than storage crates. 

Her fine ship suddenly seemed less fine to her. 

_This is stupid,_ she thought. This entire thing was stupid. Stupid of her to invite a ... a _friend_ along, to show off her ship to, when she didn't even know how to be a host and clearly was not a good one, especially since now she'd apparently poisoned him somehow.

She picked up the scanner from one of the cargo bays, formerly a cabin; she hadn't needed them, so she'd just ripped out the beds and turned them into storage. In retrospect this was probably the sort of decision that made her a terrible host.

Perhaps there were blankets in storage somewhere?

She took the scanner back to Tony. He was where she'd left him in the corridor, though he'd slid even farther down the wall until he was nearly reclining. He was probing at his own chest with his fingertips. At her approach, he looked up sharply. He still looked just as bad, maybe worse -- pale, sweaty, bluish around the lips -- and he also looked _scared._

"Here," she said briskly, kneeling beside him. The scanner was meant for diagnosing mechanical problems, but with some fine-tuning it should work for organics as well, and it would certainly do for what they needed at the moment, which was checking for metal components in his body at a level of precision her built-in sensors couldn't match. She laid the sensor strip across his chest, while Tony watched, visibly curious, and poked at it until she firmly moved his hand away. The readout projector was handheld and she turned it so he could see it while she swiped her fingers across the back of the sensor strip and fine-tuned the readings.

"Whoa," Tony said, as the 3D scan sprang to life above the projector. "Okay, nice one. Three-dimensional X-rays. I might have to see if that'd work with BARF -- okay, no, later. Can you rotate that?"

She showed him how to do it, and he spun the view, reached inside and expanded it -- she hadn't expected him to figure out the interface that quickly, but perhaps she shouldn't be surprised.

"Hell," Tony murmured as small bright sparks appeared on the readouts. "Shrapnel. Damn it, I thought they _got_ it all. They said they got it all."

"I've seen the state of medical technology on your planet," Nebula said. "I also know very well how bits of metal can hide beneath bones and other metal parts." Oh, did she ever know it.

".... right," Tony said after a momentary pause to gasp for air. "So every other thing you say is basically a full day's supply of horrifying implications, but _anyway_, I'm no doctor but I do know from personal experience that metal fragments can migrate around in the body, so okay, they missed some shrapnel and now it's not playing nice with my heart ... _again_ ..."

"It may be my fault," Nebula said, as a new and terrible thought occurred to her. "The stresses of space travel on the body and the magnetic fields in the engines may be causing it to harm you now, when it could have lain dormant for years without causing problems."

She recoiled in shock when Tony casually whapped her thigh with the back of his hand.

"Yeah, or maybe it would've ruptured an artery while I was playing Pin the Tail on the Mecha at Morgan's next birthday party and earned some child therapist a new house in the Bahamas. Believe me, I know the sound of the SS Pointless Guilt Trip leaving port. Let's say you did me a favor and we found out about it before something even worse happened."

"Worse than having shrapnel destroying your heart on a ship with no sickbay and the engines offline."

"Right," Tony said again. He twisted his head to the side and gazed blankly at the open engine compartment, the parts scattered around. "Yeah, that _is_ kind of a problem. Listen, I can walk you through undoing my changes and putting it back together. I mean, you know how to put it back better than I do, probably --"

He broke off with a gasp, gripping his chest.

That blue color in his lips had grown worse since they'd been talking. "Wait," Nebula said shortly, and she retrieved an emergency oxy mask from the compartment beside the airlock. She crouched next to him and sealed it over his face, while Tony batted at her hands and tried to contort himself impossibly to see what was happening to the lower half of his face.

"What's that? What's it do -- oh." He took a deeper breath. "Aha. That's useful." His voice was slightly muffled but intelligible.

"Tony," Nebula said, kneeling beside him. "I do not think you can wait for me to repair the engine and jump us to a port with medical facilities."

"I think," Tony said between deep gulps of the oxygen from the mask, "that you're probably right."

"I also think there is a good chance your body, in its present condition, won't survive the jump."

"Also possible." He touched the mask, ran his fingers across it. He was shivering. "No sickbay, you say."

"No," Nebula said. She had to take a breath herself, even though she had extra-efficient oxygen absorption matrixes in place of the lungs she'd been born with. "But I may be able to take them out. I perform maintenance on myself all the time, and I still have many biological components. I know how to do it."

"You, er, what." Tony left off fiddling with the edges of the mask and looked up at her. "Are you talking about surgery?"

"I suppose so?" There wasn't a distinction, to her mind. Surgery was just maintenance on a biological system. For her, it was one and the same.

"I know I'll regret asking this," Tony said, "but what kinds of tools do you have, exactly? I suppose a high-tech surgical suite would be too much to ask for."

"Engine maintenance tools," Nebula said.

"I was afraid of that."

"I use them on myself all the time."

"Yeah, I'd gotten that, but ... just to be clear," Tony said, grimacing and trying to sit up, only to slip back down the wall. "You're suggesting doing surgery on me with engine tools."

"I'll sterilize them," Nebula said, affronted.

"That's ... not actually the ..." Another spasm of pain wrung him. "Okay, you know what? Bring it. I had surgery in a _cave,_ while being held prisoner by people who were actively torturing me. Speaking of which, do I want to know if you have painkillers that work on humans?"

"Painkillers? I don't have any at all." Another thing she hadn't even thought of. Other people were not as accustomed to pain as she was. A proper host would probably have painkillers for their guests. "I might be able to find a blanket."

"Yay." Tony gave her a weak thumbs-up. She had by now spent enough time around Terrans to understand that it was a gesture of affirmation and not the offensive gesture that it was in several parts of the galaxy with indigenous thumb-bearing bipeds.

She hurried as fast as she could, collecting her usual self-repair kit of maintenance tools. There were no blankets to be found, but she had a spare jacket and also the fabric cover for a piece of unused equipment in the main cargo bay. She brought all of this back to the engine room.

In her absence, Tony had slid himself a few feet over and was working on the exposed wiring, lying flat on the floor. "Oh hi," he said through chattering teeth when she crouched beside him. "Just seeing if I could slap the engines back together into working order with a few patches. The answer is --" He grimaced and gasped. "... probably not." His voice was a breathy wheeze.

"I've asked you not to blow up my ship." Nebula laid the jacket on the floor and manhandled him unceremoniously onto it. It would help shield him from the cold floor, which she also hadn't previously thought about. She could cover him with the jacket she was wearing; she would be comfortable enough without it. She laid the fabric equipment-cover over his legs.

"Got a few questions," Tony said faintly, looking up at her. There was an open vulnerability in his expression that _hurt,_ because she knew what this felt like, lying flat and helpless while someone else prepared to take your body apart with tools. It was not a good feeling, and she found that she didn't like being on the other side of it either.

But at least she could answer questions. She might have known he'd want to know what was happening to him. She'd never been offered that, either. "What's that Terran expression?" she asked, pulling his shirt up again to expose his chest. "Oh, right. Shoot."

"Always kinda wondered about that one," Tony mumbled, while she affixed the scanner's band across his rib cage just below the affected part of his chest. "I mean, it's kind of aggressive-sounding, isn't it? As invitations go. You wouldn't answer a social invitation that way. 'Coming to the party on Sunday?' 'Yeah, shoot.' I mean, it just sounds wrong. I ramble when I'm nervous, by the way."

"I hadn't noticed," she said, opening her kit of tools. Tony twisted his head to the side, trying to see. She had a momentary urge to distract him, deflect him. But for him, she thought, not knowing was worse than having knowledge, however unpleasant. She tipped the kit where he could see it.

"Okay. Wow. Fun." He had to stop to pant for air, while she examined his chest with the scanner to find the pinpoint pricks of shrapnel. Such tiny things, to cause so much trouble. "Say, is that one of those pocket-sized heat guns we were using to weld components on the engine? Or are you just happy to see me."

She managed to elide the irrelevant parts of the question just as she did with Gamora's Terran. "Yes, it is. I can use it to cauterize severe bleeding if necessary."

"Oh," Tony murmured, "okay, the old hot poker treatment. Good to know. Is this all theoretical, or ...?"

"I have done it on myself, yes."

"You know, I'll be the first to admit that my issues have entire libraries, but I'm starting to think my library is more like the East Podunk Bookmobile branch while you've got the New York public library system, you kn-- _Fuck!"_

"Anticipation makes the pain worse," Nebula said, and she dug deeper into his flesh with a sharp-edged tool meant for scraping grease off fine engine components. It was maintenance, she thought, as blood sprang up and ran down his skin. Only maintenance.

"Good to know," Tony gasped between his teeth, white-faced. He curled his fingers into the deck until the tips turned bloodless.

***

He passed out after the second piece of shrapnel, to her vast relief. She didn't _like_ the feeling that hurting him gave her. She had never flinched away from inflicting pain, but she had also never been like those among Thanos's Children who enjoyed it, and _this_ time it caused a sympathetic pain in her own organic nerves and circuits. She would have to run a diagnostic on herself afterwards, she thought distantly, hands slick with Tony's blood.

She had not thought of the blood loss. She herself had had no issues along those lines since Thanos had replaced her blood with synthetic fluid. Her new circulatory system was designed to self-seal, and if fluid loss should ensue anyway, her body could compartmentalize any affected part with no permanent damage, as well as running her brain and core functions on their own self-contained circulatory systems. But severe loss of blood volume could kill an organic being. How much? she wondered. She had no idea. It was not one of the things she had needed to learn when she served Thanos. She was not usually assigned precision work; the torturer's techniques were not among those necessary for her training. All she needed to do was cause sufficient blood loss to kill. There were so many ways to do that to a fragile organic body: ripping out the throat, disembowelment, plunging her hands into their living chest ...

Her hands, she realized distantly, were shaking. She dialed down her body's stress hormones, raised her temperature slightly. Her mind's functions were sluggish, with unpurged memories of past kills cluttering her field of vision. She gave up on emotional control by way of fine hormonal control (it had never worked for her that well anyway) and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, on the side that still had enough organic material to send a jolt of pain through her, clearing her mind enough to dig for the next bit of shrapnel.

Tony was limp, still, and cold. She checked his pulse periodically, leaving fingerprints the bright red color of Terran blood on his pale throat. The scanner showed the fragile beating of his heart, but the fluttering pulse in his throat gave her a better idea of its relative strength or weakness. Right now, it had declined so far that she could barely feel it.

The last few bits of shrapnel were embedded in his heart itself. She could not dig them out without stopping it, and the faltering beat made her think she had little time to decide, to plan. Perhaps she could stop it briefly, dial up her nerves to their maximum speed, and work as fast as possible -- but she would also have to open up his chest to do it. The blood loss alone might be fatal.

Perhaps there was another way.

She laid her hand over his chest and focused on the electrical pathways in her body, rearranging its flow, turning her hand into an electromagnet.

It was not powerful enough, not even with all the power she could redirect. The shrapnel wasn't moving.

She could no longer tell if he was breathing. There was no _time_. Bracing herself -- she wasn't sure if a powerful electromagnetic burst from within her body might damage some of her components, even the inorganic parts of her brain -- she thrust her free hand into the nearest power conduit.

Electricity coursed through her body, burst in stars of agony behind her eyes. Her hand spasmed with the pain, and spasmed again as a series of little metallic pings peppered her fingers in a spray of Terran blood.

She sank back, gasping, her body jittering with electricity like adrenaline. The scanner fuzzed for a moment and then showed a clear view. The shrapnel that had been killing him was mostly embedded in her hand.

And also, his heart wasn't beating, just fluttering spastically. Whether it had been that final trauma as a dozen fragments of metal tore free, or if he'd caught just enough of the ambient electricity to shock his heart, it had been too much for his weakened body.

"Oh no you don't," Nebula snarled. She thrust her hand into the conduit again and slammed her shrapnel-filled palm down on his bloody chest.

Agony ripped through her, and she heard herself scream -- from the outside, as if that hoarse cry belonged to someone else. His body jerked all over. On the scanner, as it cleared from the jolt, his heart had settled into a shaky rhythm.

Nebula jerked her hand free of the conduit. It felt like she'd torn something in her throat in that scream, or perhaps damaged something with the electricity; in any case, she couldn't talk. She placed her blood-sticky hand on the oxy mask, tweaking the flow to force breaths into his half-open mouth until, with a convulsive jerk, he started breathing on his own again.

Humans were so frakking _fragile._ But also, she thought, sitting back weakly on the floor, surprisingly durable.

***

His chest was still bleeding freely. She used the heat gun to cauterize it while he was still out; he probably wouldn't like that, but he wasn't awake to complain, and she didn't want to risk the amount of blood loss it would take to stop it through pressure alone.

She slipped off her jacket and covered him with it, then sent a command to the ship to raise the internal heat. The ship warned her of battery depletion without the engines. She ordered it anyway. Even as the corridor warmed, she thought of another way to bring his temperature up more quickly. He was still dangerously cold, dangerously weak. His shivers came in convulsive waves, wracking him, only to leave him still more limp and cold in between -- as if he even lacked the energy to shiver properly.

She hadn't done this with another person in a long, long time. 

She lay down and put her arms under the jacket, awkwardly pulling him against her in a businesslike grip, and raised her internal temperature. She took it up through the standard operating parameters, all the way to the point where her sensors began giving her warnings about excessive heat. She applied it mainly to her torso, allowing the heat to flow from her arms and chest to his bare chest and abdomen. But some of the excess heat was also dumping into her legs, so she shuffled her legs a bit closer, until they were stretched out alongside his.

He stirred slightly, turning his head into her neck. Nebula froze, but it soon became clear that he had not awakened; he was only seeking heat.

She held very still, one of her arms rigid under his back, the other crossing his chest just below the grievous wounds she herself had inflicted. His rhythmic breathing, expelled through the one-way permeable mask with each exhalation, tickled her neck in a strange, unnerving way.

The last person she'd lain so close to had been Gamora, when they were small children, clinging together for warmth on the bare, cold floor of the training facility.

As Tony's shivering slowly eased, she realized that she was trembling herself, and she couldn't even have said why.

***

After his temperature and vital signs had recovered to the point where she no longer feared quite so acutely that he might die if she'd left him alone, she went on another supply trip. Food, water ... she also searched the ship's stores more thoroughly, and _finally_ found some blankets that she brought back and awkwardly bundled him in.

(Nobody had ever mentioned in her hearing that wrapping an unconscious person one's own size in a blanket was _hard._ How were you supposed to lift them to get it underneath? Was this another thing where there was a technique that everyone else learned when they were children?)

In any case, she got him wrapped up. Help would be nice, but she didn't expect it. She set the ship's distress beacon running, and she tried also sending out distress calls on the two personal frequencies she had (Danvers' comm, and Gamora's boyfriend's bunch of idiots). She wasn't expecting anything to come of it. They were in the middle of nowhere; she'd made sure of that, to ensure they wouldn't be bothered. Now she regretted her own paranoia, now that it was too late.

While waiting for the help that wouldn't come, she sat near Tony, working with a tangle of wires to get the engines back online. It was slow going, since she had to try to figure out what he'd done and then how to work around it, but it wasn't like she had anywhere else to be.

Tony woke with a grunt and a flail, and thrashed against his blankets, writhing as if someone was holding him down.

"Stark!" she said. "Tony!" She sprang to kneel beside him, hands poised but uncertain how to proceed. She had no fear of him hurting her, not in his present condition, but what concerned her was that he would hurt himself, thrashing around as he was.

But he managed to get himself oriented before she could figure out what to do about it. "Oh," he said, his voice a weak rasp, and blinked up at her. "Blue's Clues. Right. _Not_ actually tied up and held prisoner in a cave. Waking up with my chest on fire and wrapped up in whatever this is, you gotta admit --"

"Blankets," Nebula said.

"Yeah. That." He started to say more, but a coughing fit interrupted him. He started to clutch at his chest and jerked his hand away in pain, strangling on his attempts not to cough.

She reached for a water pack, peeled off the oxy mask and helped him take a few sips. The coughing eased, and Nebula realized she was supporting him with a hand under his shoulders. Well, it was a sensible position for holding someone who couldn't sit up on their own.

"You get it?" he asked weakly as she lowered him again, trying to treat him carefully as she might one of her delicate components. She wasn't used to being careful with _people._ "The shrapnel, I mean."

"All of it," she reassured him.

He nodded and closed his eyes, but opened them a few minutes later, when she'd already moved back to work on the engine. "Can't sleep," he muttered. "Clowns will eat me ... Still a no on the painkillers, huh?"

"There is more water by your hand," she told him. "You have lost a lot of fluids. You should drink it." She had contemplated various ways to create a makeshift IV to apply liquids directly to his circulatory system, but decided not to on the basis that far too many things could go wrong.

"I guess that's a no, then." He fumbled with one of the water packs before figuring out how to suck on it. "You ever think just maybe, and I'm floating this idea mainly to distract myself from the incredible amounts of pain that I'm in, you could consider laying in a stock of drugs for the next time you have to do surgery on _you?"_

He didn't sound like he was in pain. She was intimately familiar with the sound of organic beings in pain: the screams and whimpers, the gasps when breath or strength were too gone to scream anymore. This was more like ... well ... her. His voice was tight; it was clear something was wrong. But there was no breaking or sobbing or screaming.

He sounded like he was used to being in pain, she thought.

"I never thought about it," she told him.

"Did we talk about the horrifying implications? I think we did. Hey," he said, rolling his head to the side -- still white to the lips, hair a tousled mess, but his eyes were clear. "I can talk you through the engine repairs, in the interests of getting myself to sweet sweet painkillers sooner. It ought to be you putting it back together anyway. I should've thought of that from the beginning. You're going to have to fix it if something goes wrong, so you need to know exactly what I did to it, and how to undo it. Kind of like when I put the _extra special_ attachments on Morgan's bike, I mean to be fair she was only six and I didn't think she'd understand all the technical details of nanotech armor that instantly deploys and covers her body in case of a crash, but if I _had_ explained it, I wouldn't have had to make an emergency run to Mike's Bike & Chain to extract an extremely surprised bike-shop employee from girl-sized Iron Man armor. And they say I don't learn from my mistakes."

As usual, Nebula lasered her way through an asteroid field of verbiage to get to what he was actually asking. "Yes, fine, tell me," she said, and prepared herself for the inevitable corrections when she got something wrong.

***

But Tony didn't teach that way. She didn't actually know what to make of it. There were no painful corrections, no punishment of any kind, not even verbal. He was infinitely patient, even though his cessation of pain relied on her installing each piece correctly. If she failed to understand the first time, he explained again. If she connected something wrong, he pointed out why it was wrong and how she should fix it.

And he did all of this while drifting in and out of a foggy half-sleep. Often his explanations trailed off, or drifted into delirious ramblings about his daughter. Nebula tried not to wake him, tried to figure things out for herself while he'd found that much oblivion, but he didn't often sleep long; pain or dreams woke him, struggling and gasping. He calmed when Nebula caught his wrist, and explained some more things to her, and then slept some more. 

She made him drink more water and eat some of a ration pack, and helped him up to use the facilities. He was incredibly weak, and she could feel the heat of fever in him. She had tried to sterilize everything as well as she could, but humans, it seemed, were more susceptible to infection than ... whatever she was now.

"It would be ironic," she said once they were settled by the engines again, "if I removed the shrapnel that was killing you, only to kill you myself with infection."

"I think that's really more the Alanis Morissette flavor of irony."

"I don't know what you mean when you say things like that."

"I know," he said. "You can make up ridiculous culturally-referential nicknames for me if you like; it's only fair."

"Like what?"

"It's not the same if I make it up for you, is it?"

"Annoying Terran who talks too much."

"Yeah, you're on the right track, but maybe try shortening it up a bit. Something punchy. Chatty Cathy, for example."

"What is --"

"Nevermind, right, it's a kids' toy back on my world, you pull a string and she says one of a few pre-recorded phrases."

"Oh," she said, twisting two wires together and sealing them with a quick burst from the small laser built into her fingertip. "Very much like you."

"Yes, thank you, brought that one on myself, didn't I?"

"Chatty Cathy."

"Right. It's also a girl's name on my world. Some people would say that makes it extra insulting."

"I would like to have a small talk with these people."

"Completely understandable. I'd sell tickets to that, honestly. Or maybe just grab myself a ringside seat." He broke off, started to touch his chest and took his hand away.

"Drink, Chatty Cathy," Nebula ordered, pushing a water pack toward him with her foot.

"I can see that you understand the concept; now you need to come up with something snappy from your -- what _is_ your culture, anyway? I mean, what are you?"

She had stiffened at the question. "Luphomoid," she said tightly. "But I was taken from my world long ago. I don't even remember it. My culture is Thanos's now."

"No it's not," Tony said, his voice suddenly harsh. "Any more than I'm Howard's and Stane's. You are and you aren't, I mean. You can be what you want to be."

"Be silent, Chatty Cathy," she said through stiff lips, "and hydrate yourself before I stuff it down your throat."

"Persuasive argument," Tony said, and dropped the topic.

***

He was asleep when she soldered the final connection and finished running the last diagnostic.

She'd already laid in a course to the nearest inhabited system; the computer had recalculated it multiple times, and she'd plotted the course for easy jumps with little chance of emerging in the midst of solar storms or asteroids.

Still, any jump was taxing on an organic body. Especially an ill one. She didn't like to risk it. But the alternative was staying here, watching him grow weaker and sicker.

"Tony," she murmured, bending over him, and then stopped short of waking him. He was free of pain, and if he died in jump space, he would never know it. This was, perhaps, the kindest thing she could do for him.

She touched his forehead lightly with the back of her fingers, feeling the heat, and lingered a few seconds longer than necessary for her biosensors to record the temperature. Then she tucked another blanket alongside him to help keep him from rolling around if the ship bucked in jump, and turned and walked swiftly to the cockpit.

It felt very good to be back in her pilot's seat, with the entire universe at her fingertips. It was freedom of a sort she'd seldom known. But right now there was only one destination that mattered to her, and that was the one that would bring her to medical help for Tony Stark.

And if she'd hooked up something wrong, well ... neither of them would know it.

She fired up the engines, slid the controls forward, and the ship began to move.

***

It was, if she did say so herself, her smoothest entry to normal space from jump space ever. Her trainers would have been proud. They would not have beaten her; they might have even given her extra rations.

And she had fixed the engine correctly, because they were still alive. She smiled to herself.

"This is Vessel 03-097-C with a medical emergency on board," she told the system's automated traffic guidance system. "Please guide us to the nearest medical center."

The system responded with a map. She leaned back in the pilot's seat, flexed her fingers and felt the sting of shrapnel, and guided them in.

***

_"Hey_ there!" Tony's voice was cheerful and a little slurred, and he broke into a wide grin on seeing her. "It's my favorite blue cyborg killer robot lady. Hi, how are ya."

She was definitely not tempted to smile. Instead she scowled at the attendant who had shown her to Tony's room, and the woman scurried hastily away.

"You know," Tony said contemplatively, "you probably shouldn't frighten the nurses, they're the ones with the needles. Or, you know, twenty-nine-hundredth century equivalent, or whatever it is."

"I see that you have your painkillers." 

"So nice," Tony said blissfully. "You should have some yourself. Next time. They're very good. Take it from a guy who once had surgery in a cave. Painkillers are the next best thing to ... uh ..." He seemed to lose that chain of thought. "Thing," he said, waving a hand absently.

"Yes. Well." She clasped her hands behind her back. The rough bumps of the shrapnel were not unpleasant; they didn't hurt anymore, and it was more trouble than it was worth to dig them out. "Since you're not dying, I should be going."

"Wait, no! You're my ride out of here."

"Not _permanently,_" she explained. "They say it will be a Xandarian week before you're ready to be released."

"Which is how long?"

"Eight days. I can do an entire cargo run to the Heffeskan sector in that time."

"What's there?" Tony asked, his gaze clearing a bit, sharpening on her.

"Hallucinogenic snails. They're a popular galactic commodity."

"Oh. Huh. Weird. Well, I guess it can't be weirder than people licking frogs to get high. Can you, uh ... send a message home? While you're at it."

"To whom?" she asked, alarmed.

"Morgan," he said. "My friends. Just, you know. Everyone. Let 'em know I'll be awhile longer. See, I learned that one too. Don't make people worry about you unnecessarily. I'm leveling up as a person, gonna be eligible for the awards for the well-adjusted before too long."

"Your people are very strange." She didn't want to jump all the way back to Earth, but she could drop a message on Danvers' wavelength; yes, that would work. "I'll send a message. I assume you don't want me to tell them the actual truth."

"God no. I'm not _that_ well-adjusted."

"Good," she said, and a tiny smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "I wouldn't think so."

"Hey ... hey." Tony waved a hand at her, making grabby gestures. She gazed at it suspiciously. "Hey. C'mere. Just for a minute."

She had _intended_ to leave, but instead she found herself making her way to his bedside, reaching out, letting him take her metal and plastic hand in his flesh one. It wasn't the one with the shrapnel, and she forgot until too late that some of her fingertips had melted when she had conducted a ship's worth of electricity through her body. And of course that _was_ the kind of thing Tony would notice. Distracted (thankfully) from whatever he was going to say, he ran a gentle thumb across the tips of her fingers.

"This hurt?" he asked quietly.

"No," she said. It was true: it didn't, anymore.

"You should've said something."

Such hypocrisy. "You should have mentioned that a trip to space could kill you."

"I didn't know it could!" he protested. He was still holding her hand, a gentle grip she could have broken easily, but didn't want to. "Think about those painkillers, 'kay?"

"They aren't necessary."

"No, but they're hella nice." He grinned at her in a loopy kind of way. "Personal experience. Anyway, things don't have to be necessary to be worth having."

She freed her hand from his, put his hand firmly down on the edge of the bed, and pressed it firmly to keep it there. "I will be back in a week, if I feel like it."

"Yeah, cool, fine, seeya."

She walked out, thinking perhaps she would have Danvers drop by to make sure he hadn't dropped dead due to insufficient care on the medical station. The way attendants were shrinking away from her and giving her nervous looks implied to her that they didn't have the spine to stop Tony from doing anything ill-advised for a recovering organic being, which was probably nearly everything that he would want to do.

_Things don't have to be necessary to be worth having._

She felt around the edges of that thought, not quite ready to look at it directly. It was too bright, too strange. But, just as she'd gotten used to the idea of having a sister again ... maybe someday.

And perhaps she would obtain a few items of furniture for her ship. She planned to convey Tony back to Earth, after all, and she should have a bed for him. And perhaps a few other things, a chair and more blankets and .... whatever else a ship needed; she might have to look it up.

It wouldn't do to have him think badly of her ship, after all.

***

**Epilogue**

"You did _what,_ now."

"Look who's talking," Tony said, glaring petulantly at Carol from the hospital bed. And, okay, Carol mused, probably bursting into incredulous laughter when she heard his story hadn't been the most tactful thing. But honestly, open-heart surgery with engine tools and no anesthesia had to be high up there on the list of stupidest life choices she'd ever heard of.

On the other hand, he did kind of have a point re: her own life choices, which had involved flying experimental hyperspace test planes and absorbing the power of ten thousand stars.

"Fine, fine, we're both self-destructive idiots." She leaned a hip on the bed. "When is your cranky ride coming back?"

"Whenever she feels like it." He gave her a speculative look. "I don't suppose --"

"If this involves sneaking you out of the hospital, forget it. Highly advanced medical technology or not, you're as white as those sheets."

"I wasn't going to suggest that," he said, in the tone of someone who was totally going to suggest that. "Just wondering if you could pick up something from the hospital gift shop for Morgan. Preferably that thing with all the legs. Or one of the science kits. She'll like that."

"I feel as if this has to be some kind of blatant violation of first-contact principles."

Tony rolled his eyes. "The Prime Directive is fiction, Danvers; try to keep up. Oh, and while you're at it, see if they have anything compatible with Luphomoid physiology -- candy, flowers, the outer-space equivalent of Tylenol, that kind of thing."

"Why are you having me do your shopping, Stark?" But then she answered her own question. "Right. You don't have any outer space money."

"I'll pay you back."

She waved him off. "Don't worry about it. These days I'm getting paid by the Kree _and_ the Nova Corps to keep the peace. I can afford it easily. Anything specific you want for your cyborg friend, or will a generic gift do?"

"Definitely the space Tylenol. Other than that, surprise me."

Carol patted his leg. "Fine, Tony, I will pick up a cold-fusion-reactor-in-a-box kit for your second grader, and a present for your cyborg assassin buddy, and yes, I will let your family know you're fine and refrain from telling them that you almost died in outer space. Again."

"You get me. I appreciate that. We have a special connection, you and me."

"You're so full of it," Carol said, but she was laughing, and there was a bounce in her step as she went down to the gift shop to see what might be suitably interesting but not too dangerous for a genius seven-year-old.


End file.
